SFAUDi

{ PEOPLE }

I last saw Bruce Rickard a couple of months ago when we drove out together to see what is probably his last built house at Duffy’s Forest on the northern edge of Sydney. It was the perfect day for it – a rainy, mid-winter day which lent a wonderfully poetic quality to this lovely rural area. The house was pure Rickard – identifiably Rickard, but with the invariable touch of innovation, in this case the wave-like steel trusses which lifted the roof of the spacious living/dining/kitchen area up to the northern light and rolling landscape.Just last year, I enjoyed an 80th birthday party for him organised by son, Sam, at his iconic Cottage Point house, at one time his own home. Apart from the house with its intriguing flow of spaces, its direct connection to its wonderful site on the Hawkesbury and its use of timber and stone, the occasion was so very Bruce. There was an extraordinary cross-section of people there and surely at least three generations of Rickards – thanks to three marriages – people of all age groups, babies, teenagers frolicking in the pool and everyone spread over the several levels of the house and through its many Bachelardian spaces.In a sense, Bruce could be said to have ‘discovered’ Sydney’s North Shore because, more than any other architect – with the exception perhaps of Ken Woolley and the legendary Pettit and Sevitt homes – he developed a domestic architecture which was perfectly of its place. Rather than impose a version of something from somewhere else, as had been the case, Bruce created houses built from local materials, designed for a particular site, closely connected with the outside which, for the first time (apart from Burley Griffin’s Castlecrag) was landscaped in sympathy with the topography and local flora.Much has been said of Frank Lloyd Wright’s inspiration. This is true, but Bruce reinterpreted Wright for this place, this culture and for our time. In so doing, he demonstrated the importance of getting to the heart of the matter and not settling for pastiche or limp imitation. From Wright Bruce learned the principles of prospect and refuge, the importance of texture gained from layering and the use of local, natural materials and the fundamental notion of habitation.Less remarked upon is the influence of Japanese domestic architecture and garden design on Bruce’s work, itself of course an influence on Wright. But all of this added up to a sensitivity to genius loci – the sense of place and a response to how we live in the world, especially for the sensory response to light, air, water and the earth.I have no idea if Bruce had ever read architectural phenomenologists like Christian Norberg-Schulz, but there is certainly a doctoral dissertation there: Bruce Rickard, an Australian Phenomenologist.This gentle, graceful and humorous man will be greatly missed, as will his genius. But the legacy remains. I don’t know anyone who lives in a Rickard house who doesn’t feel passionately about preserving its character and who doesn’t feel that is somehow perfectly them.Paul McGillick, October 6, 2010